When I was a growth management planner in Portland, Oregon, my major job was to reconcile people's mobility needs with their livability needs. You see, if we did our jobs right, the neighborhoods would become denser, the amenities would become more numerous, costs of goods and services would be cheaper. People would want to walk around, eat at a nearby restaurant, grab groceries on the way home.

Well ... it worked. Neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon, are likely the nicest collection of neighborhoods you'll find in North America.

But what also happened is people want to go everywhere in town and see everything. So we made the city bicycle oriented, pedestrian friendly and transit supportive. We actually started to use congestion as a means to slow and regulate traffic.

In other words, rather than trying to build roads in order to arrive at zero congestion (an impossibility) - we used it as a tool in an overall network.

It was a network of living that supported a healthy and sustainable future. In gross terms, this is how I see all this falling together in my three-C's:

Connectivity:

Walkable neighborhoods

Transit coverage (distance and frequency)

Designated bikeways

Coherent Arterial Network

Few Freeways

Wayfinding Tools

Carsharing Services

Commerce:

Restaurants

Grocery Stores

Entertainment

Retail Space

Commercial Space

Banks and Other Financial

Comfort:

Schools

Parks

Trees

Government Services

Delivery Services

Healthcare (Private)

Healthcare (Public)

Police / Fire

So, assuming that this is a comprehensive list of network elements, why does traffic get so much of our attention? I think it's because we never see ourselves as "traffic", we see ourselves "caught in traffic". Traffic is the other cars in our way and not us in other people's way.

A Digression / Illustration

In Seattle, we have sections of freeways that have actually seen a decrease in traffic per day, but an increase in hours of congestion.

How perplexing!

It's my personal belief that this is due to the increase in aggressive driving and decrease in what is known as "gap tolerance". Gap tolerance is the distance you leave between your car and the car in front of you. As gap tolerance decreases, congestion increases.

If all cars go exactly the same speed things are fine. Cars obviously do not go the same speed. So if you have five cars all very close to each other and the lead car decreases its speed by only 1 mile an hour, the second car will need to decrease 2 miles per hour in order to avoid hitting it (unless it decreases speed magically at exactly the same time). The third car now has to decrease its speed and so forth through the chain.

If we started at 50 we have this 2 mph backward progression:

Car 1 - 49

Car 2 - 47

Car 3 - 45

Car 4 - 43

Car 5 - 42

Now car 5 is going nearly 10 Miles an hour slower than the first car. Behind car 5, maybe there are two other clusters of five cars.

Soon, you get everyone on the freeway going 20 mph, simply due to a normal fluctuation of the lead car.

What happens if you are car 11 in this progression? You say "Why the hell are we slowing down?!"

But the fact is, you are slowing down because YOU are traffic. It's hard to accept blame for being in the middle of a series you can see neither the end or beginning of. But you are actually the body, the heart, of this monster.

This continues when you get off the freeway and are now late and race through someone's neighborhood to make your appointment.

That guy you see flying down the street in front of your house and think, "God! Slow down buddy!" is actually just another incarnation of you (or me), typical American.

Return to Topic

The popularity of the discussion and over-emphasis on traffic in our overall livability leads inevitably to the misinterpretation of transportation amenities. The suburbs look better because the streets are wider, the stop signs fewer, and apparent traffic - less. The thought being that the ability to drive 40 mph through suburban neighborhoods to get home (quickly?) will make life more livable.

The fact that we can no longer walk anywhere whatsoever is sublimated by the orgasmic internal view of driving unhindered for blocks on end.

We weren't able to solve this dilemma in Portland. I think in the end, only the total depletion of fossil fuels will finally solve it. One nice thing though, there's been a noticeable shift toward living in places where there is walkability and amenities.

26 July 2007

Walkscore is a site that uses some simple techniques to figure out how walkable your neighborhood is. They use a few elements like access to amenities and roadway connectivity to tell you how easy it is to live life and still be able to use your legs.

Here we see the major elements of Walkscore - the rank, the map, the placement of amenities, and the lists of those amenities (the seconds, e.g. Grocery Stores, unfold to show all of them). The ranking from 0 to 100 shows how pedestrian friendly your neighborhood is. NW Portland is extremely walkable and is loaded with amenities, so I thought it would be a good example.

To contrast, here is my childhood home in Grand Island, Nebraska:

We see here that my place Grand Island ranks a paltry, depressing 17. But wait, let's take something a little different and see how Walkscore settles up.

The map below is of Compton, California. Compton was rated the most dangerous city in America in 2006. It has a fairly impressive walk score of 63.

So, in Grand Island you might need to walk a little further to get something, but your worst outcome might be a mosquito bite. Compton has a much higher walk score, but that doesn't mean you want to walk around there.

Now, further, my neighborhood in Seattle gets an 82. But the streets here go basically straight up. I know if my father were generating a Walkscore out of his own needs, he'd give Grand Island a much higher rating.

I love the academic exercise in Walkscore. I also love the promise of being able to analyze neighborhoods for how inherently livable they are - as opposed to merely how deceivingly cheap the land is.

Walkscore has a ways to go before it's really complete. A complete analysis like this will include things like:

Topography

Average speeds on roadways

locations of pedestrian crossings

average daily traffic on the roadways

existence of on-street parking

traffic calming measures

whether the amenities being walked to are on the street or behind a sea of parking

trees

parks

specific ped-friendly points (benches, coffee shops, places to rest)

weather

pedestrian barriers (freeways, dangerous places, etc.)

Having said all this, Walkscore is already an excellent tool to demonstrate the hidden costs of living in the suburbs. One is fairly required to drive everywhere. Even in enlightened Washington State, we have our mindless sprawl.

Here we have a confluence of inconvenient living, no transit, streets without connectivity, very steep topography, the streets have average speeds of 40 miles per hour, and no amenity whatsoever within a half mile. And you notice it gets worse as you go west. (If you think I'm being unfair, I could have picked many many cases worse than this.)

Looking at this on a map and seeing the distance one must traverse to get to anything will hopefully help people consider distance when choosing where to live.

So, keep it up Walkscore people! This has some serious promise to save Americans from themselves.

09 May 2007

A while ago Ed Vielmetti, yeah- the walking guy, grabbed a bunch of questions from 103 Bees and answered them in his blog. See, 103 Bees mines your blog's search-hit history and analyzes it in various ways. One of those ways is to give you a list of direct questions people have asked and, for whatever reason, Google (usually) has directed them to you. Also, usually these questions are no where and in no way answered in your blog.

Many times these questions are outright insanity and you stare at the results trying to figure out how they made it to your blog in the first place. But, nonetheless, through the great mystery that is "relevance" there they are. Unrelated questions driving traffic to your site.

I thought Ed's use of the questions would be a great way to get rid of writer's block. Well, today I'm working from home. My back patio is lined with spring plants waiting to make it to the ground or into containers and I have writer's block.

So I'm going to take a few questions from my list from 103 Bees and answer them for real. Yes, these are real questions real people asked a search engine and somehow found their way to Jim Benson's blog.

Question 1: How do I get oblivion without using a torrent?

I am assuming anyone who would ask this question does not actually want to buy the game Oblivion at full retail, and is not asking how to obtain actual oblivion. Lucky for you, the Internet includes eBay, a quick search gives you Oblivion on three platforms (XBox 360, PS3 and PC). The lowest price here is a penny. I think you can suck it up and pay a penny for something you really want.

Question 2: How do I draw a couch {facing forward}?

A lot easier than you would facing backward. But if you were looking for a how-to... First, draw a rectangle that is about 4 times as long as it is high. Now on either end at the bottom draw a little square (make sure they are both the same size). Now on top of that box on either side draw an upright rectangle that's about twice as high as it is wide and is about the same height at the original rectangle. Now, at the top rectangle to the left draw a line going up a little bit, now make another line going up that same amount from the far side of the of the right rectangle. Now join those two rectangles. If you did that right it looks like a couch. If you did that wrong, I suggest you look directly at the front of a couch.

Question 3: 48 laws of power how to read?

I'm including this question because I actually see it fairly often. I wrote a pretty crummy review of the book and left it at that, but many people have come to the site with searches like this. How do I read the book? I'm scared of the book? Does the book corrupt people? Is the book accurate?

The 48 Laws of Power is an historical look back on how people of immense power obtained and lost that power. The overarching principles of how to influence, manipulate, and hoard in the quest of power. I've had people tell me that they would not read the book, lest some of those lessons actually rub off on them and they would become bad people.

In my opinion, it's a great book and I've used lessons in it to actually avoid falling into the same traps as those who have allowed others to be manipulated. Ultimately, though, understanding "bad" is a primary key of becoming "good".

We can see many people in the world of "good", from Jerry Falwell to Bill Clinton, who have pontificated "good" and did "bad" and were honestly surprised by it.

The 48 Laws of Power aren't all "bad", however, many can be mustered in the true service of "good". Much like drinking, many of the 48 laws are helpful in moderation, harmful in over-indulgence.

As for "How to read?" I would say that the 48 Laws of Power is not a how-to manual, but a book of lessons. The are delivered in as amoral a manner as possible and it is up to you to fill in the moral lessons.

Be your own Gandhi.

Question 4: What should be the conclusion of Ubik?

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is also a major search engine hit for me. Ubik is a story of pattern matching and the bewildering nature of misinterpretation. Some of the characters in the book are dead. We're not sure which ones or how dead they actually are. A mysterious substance called Ubik may provide relief from this state. But what is Ubik?

PKD uses all sorts of vehicles to foist Ubik upon the characters and the reader. Some people know about it, sometimes it's a snack, sometimes it's a cleaning solution.

Written in 1969, Ubik also is fully aware of Marshall McLuhan and the saturation of push-advertising. Each chapter starts with a gratuitous advertisement for Ubik - each time Ubik is performing an entirely different miracle solution to common problems.

Ubik, in the end, is about corporate control. Over our choices, over our flows of information, and ultimately over how dead we can actually get.

Or at least that's my conclusion, anyway.

Question 5: How many people have read being and nothingness?

Millions of people have read Being and Nothingness of their own free will.

29 April 2007

I've been musing about the relationships between constructed spaces and information spaces. These musings have focused on what happens in spaces (design, use, flexibility, etc.) but what happens between spaces is equally important. How do we get from place to place in the built environment and how do we do it on the Internet?

In Urban Planning, we discuss connectivity a lot. It's a difficult issue that often runs face to face with other issues like transportation, private property, and environmentalism. Connectivity, like is sounds, is about making things connected.

For people, our perception of our world is how we interpret our world. If something looks far away or seems hard to get to, then it is.

Here's an example. Before the creation of I-5, the East Lake and Boston neighborhoods of Seattle were connected. You could easily walk from place to place. After I-5, they were highly separated. Now getting from "Start" above in Eastlake to my "Finish" in the Boston neighborhood is very difficult.

The path above (sorry it's purple, I couldn't make it change) shows driving directions from Start to Finish. You basically drive away from Finish, towards it for a while, away from it again and then towards it. Your trip from Start to Finish is roughly 5 times the actual distance between the two points.

On foot, you can walk underneath the freeway (always a pleasant experience) because it is open.

So we cut off roughly half of the automotive trip there. Notice the scale of the large apartment complex in the lower left. The Freeway is even larger. So even walking under the freeway is a barrier. It's loud, dirty and scary.

But we are determined to make it to finish. If we were law abiding citizens, we'd finish the trip as Google had drawn it. This is the end of our "legal" shortcuts.

You've heard of folksonomy? Well there's also folksography. This is where people popularly create livable and usable spaces out of barriers in the built environment.

Here we can clearly see a trail up the side of the hill to our destination.

So, the built environment gave us a series of impediments that we were able to force our way through to get to our objective.

But people most often drive. Why? Because we don't like to force our way through to our objectives. The perception of the barriers (the dark scary freeway and cutting through people's back yards) makes us uneasy. So people tend not to do it.

Perhaps more important, this route has no real coherence. That 8 block walk would be easy in downtown. The cityscape there is coherent. One block leads to the next with clear demarcations for people and vehicles. Our presence on the sidewalk is socially accepted. We don't have to fight for our right to be there.

In this trip above, you move from Start to Finish through wildly different settings and crossing social barriers. These elements add to our perception of the distance from start to finish. Even though we were able to eliminate the physical barriers that made the car trip longer, we weren't able to eliminate the psycho-social barriers of the shorter trip.

Relating to the Internet

If we were to think of Start and Finish as ideas on the Internet, their proximity might also be seen as their relevance. So they are close to each other and therefore, pretty relevant. The purple line could therefore be seen as finding your way from them using a search engine like Google.

Search Engines

Google is a guessing machine that takes your very vague input and tries to provide something relevant. It's pretty good. Even though the driving route from Start to Finish was visually circuitous, it could have also totally left Seattle and gone to Greece and come back again.

From a global perspective it's a really short trip.

Much of the traffic to my blog is from search engines. Here's some recent searches that have led people to me (courtesy of 103bees):

This shows is a hodgepodge of relevance or coherence. People using Google to search for stuff end up at my blog in their search for what the Internet is fond of calling "relevance". But what is relevant is not necessary coherent or in context.

So we see people looking for things like a "For One More Day Torrent". This is because I have a review of Mitch Albom's For One More Day in the left bar of this blog and a few posts on Torrents.

But worse yet, if I say something like "Neck Spasm" or worse yet, link to "Neck Spasms" then in the future I become more relevant to the search term Neck Spasms while having very little actually to do with Neck Spasms.

So search engines are a great way to find irrelevant relevance. But we use them every day. Why? Because there have historically been few alternatives. Search Engines provide the Internet with a base layer of connectivity.

Focused Sites

There are sites that try to focus better than a generalized search engine. These include things like Techmeme, Google News and Megite. The image below is from Techmeme.

The level of real relevance here is very high. But the topics are dictated. This is not a bad thing. I read Techmeme every day. It's a powerful pulse point for the technical community. I have been fortunate to find myself quoted there frequently.

Techmeme and sites like it use a combination of automated techniques and human intervention to comb the Internet for events and create coherence and context. All the articles above directly deal with the same topic and, most often, cross-quote.

A post like this is unlikely to make it into Techmeme, because it doesn't fall into the Techmeme formula. Techmeme is most often looking for items of innovation in Technology, be that a the release of a new product, an event (like the one above) that may have repercussions in how products are used or perceived, or an event that has some impact in the tech blogging social sphere.

This isn't a bad thing, in fact you could argue it's good. Techmeme is creating coherence by having a coherent content generation model.

The good news here is that as information travelers, we can use Techmeme to easily find a meme and follow it.

Social Bookmarking

As we found things through Google that were relevant but not in context, oddly social bookmarking can give us the opposite. We get irrelevant things in context.

Here we see (with one obvious exception) things that are in context for business. However, none of these things have much to do with each other.

I can click around here and find some things I wasn't expecting. For example, I do appreciate the fact that the Y Combinator neo-VC site greets you by telling you to wake up.

Folksonomies are great for highly specialized tags that you share in a relatively small group or for highly generalized tags that you want to surf for happy accidents, like my finding Y Combinator just now.

But happy accidents don't make coherent informationscapes.

So the more general the keyword in a social tool like del.icio.us, the less relevant the information will be.

Here are all the things tagged "GrandIsland". Grand Island is not a very interesting tag. But it is enough to get a few things. But we see here 1/3 is dealing with Cancun. 2/3rds are dealing with Grand Island, Nebraska.

So this tag, even though it was not saturated like "business", still has a relatively low amount of relevance in the articles tagged.

For that you need a focused group of individuals with a fairly good overlap in what a tag means to them.

Here with the tag "socialmedia" we have a long list of highly relevant and in-context information. The group of people who would know to tag "socialmedia" is small and fairly well focused.

I follow this tag often in much the same way I follow Techmeme. It's a powerful tag with a high degree of coherence.

But there's an accessibility issue here. How do people know to look for certain tags? Especially when "social media" is two words in real life but "socialmedia" on del.icio.us?

The more on-topic a tag is likely to be, the more esoteric it seems to be. The less esoteric, the more it is open to spamming or misuse.

Direct Links

Direct links are currently the best of all possible worlds for creating context and coherence. It is rare that someone will link to something completely unrelated to what they are talking about. So while reading an article on brain surgery, you are generally likely to find very coherent links.

The problem? Most sites that deal with serious topics like health issues are unlikely to link to other sites. For example, Webmd.com has great blogs and discussion groups that it links to - but they are all internal.

It's a nice place to start your search for medical issues, but it often won't give you someone local to go have coffee with and chat about your situation.

So direct links are good, when they exist. But they are rarely there when you need them and are even more seldomly comprehensive.

An Inconnective Truth

Both the Internet and our built environment suffers from lack of conceptual coherence. There are no easy conceptual threads to follow through the hodgepodge of information uses on the net. We build trails for ourselves in the forms of direct links and tagging, but direct links are poorly maintained trails and tagging can end up arterials congested by traffic and bad drivers.

Perhaps this is indicative of human beings in general. Perhaps the way we settle physically, mirrors how we think, and this in turn translates to the Internet. We are highly a highly disorganized species that conceives of itself as organized. A race of faulty pattern-matchers staring out at chaos.

In our cities we have also seen that over-planning creates the mundane. How often do people take a trip to Overland Park, Kansas compared to a trip to Kansas City?

My goal here isn't to tame the Internet, but to perhaps start a conversation about how to better navigate it. The best cities on earth (London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Montreal) all have been built to navigate via a wide variety of means (subway, cab, bus, walking, car, etc.).

The net has these too. You might take the Google to a blog where you'll find a link and follow that to a tag which takes you to a list of links from which you select a few and find a great thread that you spend the day with.

My questions that arise from this include:

Are our current search options enough?

Are our current search techniques enough?

How can we create social media tags that retain coherence?

Is there something beyond direct linking?

Are self-imposed tags like we use in Technorati useful?

Can we create social-threading?

How can the "conversation" be truly two way?

How can we make explicit the differences between context and relevance?

20 April 2007

Google Maps is wonderful and I use it nearly every day for a wide variety of things. But it annoys me that Google Maps tells me to Swim across the atlantic ocean to get from New York to Paris ... BUT ... it can't tell me to walk across Market Street in San Francisco.

Tomorrow, I'm going to the Digital Be-In in San Francisco as part of my Interra / WISER duties. I'm staying at the Parc 55, which is at 55 Cyril Magnin Street. The Be-In is at 444 Jessie Street which is basically 3 blocks away.

It's a 4 minute walk. But I can't walk in Google maps. Nor can I bike.

So I get traffic-centric directions to go 3 blocks, like you see in the map to the left.

This is a bigger problem than one might realize. As you can see, the Powell Street Bart station is right next to my hotel. I can fly into SFO, get on Bart, get off there and walk to my hotel.

But there are other conditions where pedestrian mapping becomes problematic. Pedestrians often run into walls built in the last 50 auto-centric years. We now have walled neighborhoods, parking lots that don't connect, 12 lane arterials, freeways, soundwalls, and other barriers.

When building maps for transit users, these walking maps are key. If you get dropped off at a stop that's two blocks from your destination but on the other side of a freeway, you could have a several mile walk ahead of you.

02 March 2007

This is my reply to an article on nowpublic where someone rated the top 10 transit systems. The post got a good bit of responses and I tossed in my 2 cents after someone requested to link some of my MTR photos to it.

The top 10 list of world transit would include no US transit systems. I'm not saying this to be snobby, I've worked on building or improving many of them in the US.

However, a good transit system requires four main components:

1. Wayfinding - A city with good transit is impossible to get lost in. Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Berlin fit this nicely. There are so many stations all attached to the system, that only minimal wandering is necessary before finding a station and re-orienting yourself. This is vital especially for Americans who are afraid of the small windy streets of HK or Tokyo. It is much easier to find your way around there because both cities have ample signage.

2. Coverage - A city with good transit makes it easy to get around without a car or a cab. This means enough of the city is covered by transit to make its use unavoidable.

3. Comprehesibility - When you look at a subway map, you need to know where you are and where you are going. For most US systems - which are mostly bus - this is very difficult even for experienced users. Headways in the US (length of time between buses) are seldom less than 20 minutes. This means you have long wait times and the need to micromanage your trip goes up. Transfers become more problematic. The selection of the perfect succession of buses becomes imperative. This increases your travel time beyond merely the travel - you have to invest time up front to figure out exactly when you need to appear in specific locations to make your trip. This drastically decreases the usability of the transit system. In many cities world wide transit is a convenience. In the US it is a hindrance.

4. Popularity - I have been a transit user in almost every major city in North America. I can't say any are personally popular with me. The top of the US for me are: Portland, Oregon - the Bay Area (only because BART finally goes to the airport) - Boston - Washington DC. But you can't really call any transit agency popular when our rider marketshare is so universally low. In Hong Kong, the cleanest place in town in the Subway. The MTR is clean, safe, efficient, convenient, and indispensible. It is extremely popular and universally used throughout by people from all income classes. It's also privately run.

06 February 2007

Tonight I was following my colleague Frank to a restaurant in Orange County. I followed him through many traffic lights and past many strip malls. Then we turned into this mall and drove around for several minutes. Finally he pulled over and pulled along side.

"You seem a bit lost, eh?" I yelled over to him.

Frank has lived here for a very long time. He knew the restaurant was in this particular mall. But he couldn't find it.

He tried to call some people on his cell and no one was available.

Finally, I noticed a sign pointing to the restaurant, which was up a flight of stairs. Since you can't even walk in a mall here, we were both driving two separate cars, so I had to chase Frank down, get him to pull over and tell him to follow me.

When we finally parked he said, "How the hell is anyone supposed to see that?"

I told him that they hadn't read Ambient Findability. (if you are reading this in the blog, the review for Ambient Findability is in the left column)

It was tongue-in-cheek, but true. Suburban sprawl has so few wayfinding clues of actual merit - and you have to see these wayfinding clues in a moving vehicle. There's no time for consideration. You either see it or you don't.

07 January 2007

Yesterday I created a little social news site for myself using PageFlakes. One of the things I mentioned there was that I had one page leveraging my network, but I had a second page with news sources outside my network.

Your network can be one of two things: a support structure or a barrier to outside perspectives. This worked well today. From outside my network came the post right before this one on Torrents.

Now, from inside my network is a variety of links, one of which from Howard:

"In life today we get to meet people in a very specific situation and social background. You meet people from your school, from your family or from your work," said Jérémie Chouraqui, a lawyer and one of the founders of Peuplade.

"With Peuplade you will meet people that you will usually not get to meet in cities: people with different ages and social backgrounds, but they all live in the same neighbourhood."

So this site aims to get neighbors together. To bond the neighborhood itself. To explore its diversity.

Of course, you are still meeting a self-selected group - but that's better than nothing. And it helps Parisians both grow their personal networks and experience other perspectives.

25 December 2006

Every city in the world is different. It has its own culture, its own quirks, and arrays of subcultures and undercurrents. They are vital and alive and that life interests me, energizes me ... awakens me.

It's hard to explain to people - especially when I am visiting - that what I really want to experience is the city itself. Specific tourist attractions are fun and enjoyable, but they aren't what really draws me to a place.

Most residents of a city go to tourist attractions when tourists come to town or for an event that is hosted there. Rarely otherwise. Seattle residents don't hang out at the Space Needle.

So I'm most happy when I feel integrated with a subculture in a given city and get a chance to experience life in that city. For example, my favorite times in Los Angeles were when I went A-gay nightclub hopping with my friend Akio and when I went with my friend John to a grimy Pho noodle house to a Pho gathering.

I feel most at home in Hong Kong when I wake up and wander down the street to back-alley Jok place for breakfast or when I have an appointment and I jump on the subway to get there.

And, truly, I most loved Tokyo when I went to the grocery store and bought groceries. I loved New York the morning where we woke up early, walked around Tompkins Square because it was fenced off due to a recent mini-riot, and over to a restaurant for coffee where we sat out on the street next to an empty lot filled with rubble.

I loved Washington DC when I could direct a van full of quilt through the busy city streets without a map. I loved Chicago when, during the Printer's Row book fare, I guided a bunch of people to the "real" Chicago pizza.

Apparently, I like food a lot too. But what I really like is the feeling of comfort I get from a City. When I learn its layout, how the residents use it, where pockets of interest might be. When I need something and I know several places to get it and several ways to get there.

Because when you know that, then you really start to see the cultures that swim in the city. You start to notice things like "this city has a lot of used bookstores here" or "this city has subtle racial segregation here" or "this area is clean because people have lived here for generations and care about it" or "this area is cleaned because of recent gentrification."

You start to find threads of interest like "The Jewish community in this city is really active and into music" or "The Green party is really active here" or "There sure are a lot of people here into progressive rock."

Those threads are where my real interest lies. The communities that form in cities that make up its character. When a subculture is truly active it has massive energy. It's a wonder to bask in that.

And every subculture exists in space and time. You generally need to meet, need to have activities, need to exchange ideas in real-time. Suburbia and rural areas cannot generally support this because they don't have the density. We tried to kill this off in our cities from the 30s to the 80s by over-planning our cities (trying to make them dense suburbs).

But cities have a way of self-regulating. They push toward a more socially active population. People thwart planning all the time. Look across America and you will see previously strictly zoned warehouse space repurposed for housing, work space, art coops, light manufacturing, schools, and entertainment.

The force of culture was stronger than zoning regulations.

Cities inspire me. Their design, the use of the cities, the actions and style of the subcultures, the soul of the population moves me. They keep me outward reaching, anxious to grow and resistant to stagnation.

17 December 2006

In the early 90s, I was working as a regional planner for Metro - the regional government in Portland, Oregon. We were creating the Region 2040 plan, which was very exciting work. I recall one day I was working with my boss John Fregonese and I was telling him how I almost got a ticket the previous night for jaywalking. I said, "I think jaywalking is great." He agreed vehemently. And we proceeded to go on a 20 minute mutual rant about why everything we were doing culminated in jaywalking as a public good.

You see, we were trying to do things like reduce street widths, mandate on-street parking and do other things that facilitated cars, but made them part of the environment and not the elements that controlled it. Thinner streets, slower cars, more controlled intersections, less surface parking lots, all made it easier to walk. Easier to walk is easier to cross the street. That's jaywalking.

In the 1960s, William H. Whyte and his band of "hippie" students went out into the New York streets and used time lapse photography to study how people used the urban outdoors. Why were some plazas heavily used while others were not? It often appeared counter-intuitive, some beautiful courtyards were utterly unused while other plain or ugly ones were used heavily.

They found many elements that induced use - but the major one was ... people. People beget people. We are herding animals.

On the plains, you'd see ruts cut in the grasses that showed where others had gone before. In your grade school library you could tell the popular books because they were all beat up. In Whyte's popular gathering places there were people present. These are visual cues to usage.

On a web site or in a computer program, we have few cues as to the popular destinations or usage patterns. We have cues as to how the designers want you to use the software, but we can't see the direction of the swarm. We are all numb bees.

For the consumption of information or culture, we have all sorts of trailblazing or wayfinding tools now. Digg, del.icio.us, and my god it is a long list. But all these tools requires self-reporting which doesn't come naturally to many people. And they don't tell the whole story.

Web site owners have plenty of stats as to where people go on their sites. But we find that we lack some key information (or at least have to really dig to get it). We don't know why they show up, if it was an accident, if they had a good time, if they (the particular they) will come back, what will stop them from coming back, etc.

In my wondering about wayfinding on the net, I also wonder about destinations. How do we record our movements, our trailblazing? How do we provide visual cues to the rest of the swarm when we find something good?